The Perfect Child(3)

“The police brought in an abandoned toddler. She’s pretty beat up. They found her wandering around a parking lot. She was only wearing a diaper and some kind of weird collar thing around her neck. How sad is that?” She talked fast, eager to get out the story before she got called to the next crisis. “She wouldn’t let the police anywhere near her. It took three officers to coax her into the car. She’s filthy, has blood all over her hands and arms, but we can’t clean her until they’ve gathered all the evidence that might be on her. They have no idea who she is or where she’s from.”

The angry knot of unfairness lodged in my stomach. Why did the universe allow people who hurt kids to have them? Why couldn’t it give them to people like me, who wanted them?

My husband, Christopher, and I had tried to get pregnant for years, but it was one disappointment followed by another. We got a second opinion after our doctor diagnosed me with an inhospitable uterus, but he agreed with the first doctor—birthing a child of my own was impossible. I swallowed down the bitterness. Some days it was better than others. Today wasn’t one of those days.

“Do they have any leads on her parents?” I asked.

“Nope. Not a thing. They think either she walked over there from the trailer park across the street or she was dropped there by someone.” She wrinkled her face in disgust. “She’s so skinny, looks like she hasn’t eaten in days.”

“Poor thing. Hopefully, they’ll find her parents, and it’ll turn out to be some weird accident or misunderstanding.”

Stephanie raised her eyebrows. “Misunderstanding? What kind of misunderstanding leads to your toddler being lost in a parking lot wearing only a diaper? And blood. Did you forget that part?”

“Someone’s got to be an optimist.”

I wished I were as optimistic as I pretended. I used to be. Not anymore.

Stephanie burst out laughing and squeezed my arm. “That’s what I love about you,” she said before hurrying off.



Christopher was waiting for me with a cup of chamomile tea when I got home. He held his cup of morning coffee in one hand and my favorite mug in the other—the one that said PUG LIFE on the front even though I’d never owned a dog. I’d been working swing-shift overnights for the last two years, and he worked days unless there was an emergency, so we were on opposite schedules, but it worked for us. It gave us an opportunity to miss each other, and sometimes you needed that in a relationship even when you loved each other as much as we did.

I grabbed the mug from his hands while I slipped off my shoes and followed him into the living room. I plopped down on the sofa beside him and sank into it, the down feathers contouring around my body. It was the piece of furniture we’d fought over the most when we had decorated the house shortly after we’d bought it. The living room was one of the first rooms you saw when you came inside, and he had thought we should have a formal couch so that it would look pristine and nice. But our house was too small to have another main living area, so I’d known we’d spend all our time there and wanted it to be comfortable. In the end, I had won, and he’d said on more than one occasion that he was glad I had because he couldn’t imagine coming home to a stiff couch.

He sat on the other end, and I stretched my feet onto his lap. He peeled off my socks and started massaging my feet. When I’d first told my sister about his foot rubs after work, she’d been sure it was only because we were newlyweds, but he was still doing it after all these years. If he was there at the end of my shift, he rubbed my feet. Period. It didn’t matter if he’d been in surgery for twelve hours.

“Well?” He raised his eyebrows, questioning.

You couldn’t practice medicine and not be affected by it. Over the years, we’d grown into each other’s therapists. We understood what it was like to be responsible for other people’s lives in a way nobody outside the profession could.

“Eloise was in again tonight.”

“What was it this time?”

“Blood clot.”

“And?”

“Negative.”

He smiled. His dark hair was combed straight back, a few strands stretched flat over a thinning spot in the back. He was self-conscious about his hair loss, but I didn’t care. I loved the weathered look, and as far as I was concerned, he grew more handsome with age. Men were lucky that way. Even his wrinkles were cute.

“What’s your day look like today?” I asked.

“Two surgeries. Three consults.”

Christopher was an orthopedic surgeon at Northfield Memorial, the same hospital where I worked. Northfield was the largest regional hospital in Ohio, and we’d met in the cafeteria while he was a first-year medical student back when he used to work all day and study all night. He’d been so focused and goal driven that he almost hadn’t noticed me, but his work ethic had paid off. It had landed him a residency followed by a specialty placement.

“Anything interesting?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Oh, before I forget to tell you, make sure you read the email from Bianella. She wants us to go to a seminar next weekend on international adoption. There’s supposed to be a panel of parents talking about some of the hidden challenges in international adoptions,” he said.

Bianella was our adoption specialist. We had connected with her after our fertility doctor had sat us down and explained the grim statistics for the final time. Christopher and I had always wanted kids, so adoption was a logical choice for us, and we’d dived into researching facilities immediately, not wanting to waste any more time than we already had. I had been almost forty at the time, and neither of us had wanted to be older parents. I had thought adopting a child would be easy in the same way I had thought getting pregnant would be easy when I’d first started. We’d already had one failed adoption, and it had hurt as bad as any miscarriage.